Messages

Or implement the AcEnhancedCrafting feature of adding a button outside the bill to change that without getting inside the bill =D
[/quote]

That would sure be useful. Just a small toggle-icon maybe to save space?
I'm thinking a down arrow for floor, side arrow for stockpile?

As long as it's visible at a glance that would almost be as good. My problem is that I sometimes just forget the setting and then production suffers inefficiency for a log time until I randomly notice that something is wrong and "debug" it.

-Stigma

Try to place a quarry on an iceshelf biome, you barly find a place to build it.

Sure, but how does a deep core mine make any sense on an icesheet either?
You are literally living on top of the frozen ocean. Digging deep isn't likely to get you more than a lot of cold water.

-Stigma

For arresting your own people to make sense you kind of have to assume that they are combative, at least temporarily. In that case they might very well decide that they would rather go find another place to live than be in prison.

It seems fine to me - if prisoners don't act like like prisoners then what sense does it make to even arrest them in the first place. If you let some guy who just had a psychotic break just wander into the forest because you left his room unlocked then ... well ... that's on you I guess

-Stigma

Im generally against roads seperating fields of dirt because while dirt itself has a beauty of -1, a road tile would easily get dirty and therefore create an uncomfortable environment for your colonists or extremely tedious cleaning tasks.
Your farmer will spend most of his time actually planting or cutting your plants so that his movement speed doesn't matter all that much and hauling the harvested yield won't be that much faster with roads either.

So if you do insist on using them, I recommend using few road tiles for big fields to keep the amount of cleaning work reasonably low.
However, I think that everything would work faster if your cleaner didn't have to clean the pathways and hauled the yield instead.

Hmm... I guess it's a fair point - but I have never bothered to clean any pathways before (I only clean rooms and absolutely nothing else, rarely even stockpile-rooms). I haven't really run into many mood problems, but then my pawns tend to be maxed on beauty by breakfast.

But it is a valid point - I'm just not sure how much it really impact the outside beauty. I will have to check. That said... using no roads at all? Good god - how will people get anywhere?

-Stigma

As far as I know, multiple layers don't help.

Different cover has different defense though. Walls (you can keep corners) are great. Sandbags are also good.

Angles matter also - cover is only 100% effective if it is directly between you an the enemy, so very good cover is often alternating wall with sandbags (or doors - since it is very useful to be able to duck to safety if you are injured).

-Stigma

Don't play on the largest map...

Performance is one thing (it scales badly beyond the medium and slightly larger maps).

Actually being able to use the map is another issue. Pawns travel slowly even on perfect terrain. Traveling from one side to another in a very large map takes so long that you will want to avoid this at all costs because it kills efficiency - so playing on extremely large maps you really only end up using a tiny portion of it.

And as the game goes on it will get slower for a variety of reasons... you might regret it - just saying.

Personally I have a hard time recommending anything over 275-300 tiles. It just becomes impractical for the sort of game this is. I kind of made the exact same mistake myself and I've scaled back heavily in later games.

-Stigma

It this a working strategy?

I have some mountain areas close to my colony that I mined for steel and plasteel.

I don't use these mountains anymore. Insects have spawned twice and I was able to kill them, but I just got the idea of filling the mountain with walls (stone, I guess) to prevent them from reappearing.

Will this work?

In short - yes.

Conditions for spawning:
- Need 16 connected tiles with an overhead mountain. Doors do connect, but not walls, so if you just make walls enough that no area is 16 or more tiles they will not spawn. In other words you don't even need to fill the whole mountain.
- Need to be a player-made structure somewhere nearby (I think like 20 tiles range).
- The 16 tiles (I THINK it's 16... may neeed to look that up) need to be unoccupied, so furniture and such count against it.
- The deeper inside a mountain the higher the risk of spawning
- The less light, the higher the risk
- As long as there is at least 1 possible tile to spawn in anywhere on the map then it will happen when the event triggers. (usually you need to dig out somewhere before there is any risk).

My main strategies for this is:
- Fill spaces after mining so there aren't 16+ areas for them to spawn.
- Make a "honeypot" cave in a reasonable safe are. A big cave as deep as possible with at least one wall or something else constructed. You can make it overwhelmingly likely for bugs to prefer spawning there - then you can kill them with fire or something along those lines (wooden floors and some sturdy doors work great...)

-Stigma

Animals can absolutely be devastating in battle, but it's a very complex question with a lot of factors involved.

Scale is a big issue. Animals (or any melee in general) does well in lower numbers battles. As the number on each side increases the animals will struggle more and more - it's the basic "zerglings vs marines" thing where range will always benefit from scale. Ultimately I think attack animals will hit a wall in terms of effectiveness as raids become too large to defeat without massive casualties (though to be fair, in late game you may be able to replace animals very quickly too given large numbers).

As for what animal to choose, that again is very complex. here are some things to consider at least:

- upkeep. Are they easy to feed and train (wildness)?
- size. Small animals are very hard to hit. large ones are easy.
- Tankyness. Weak animals will often die when they go down, but something like an elephant or rhino will usually just be incapacitated, and you can patch them up. With the right mod like "a dog said" you can even fix missing missing limbs and other such things, but tanky animals will also tend to be more resistant to these problems also.
- Breeding rate. A pretty big thing since it matter much less if you have large losses if you can replace them fast.
- Off-duty use. It's not very optimal if your animals can't do anything besides fight occasionally - not unless they are the type that can essentially feed themselves (graze) and not be a burden. So it often boils down to "can it be trained to haul in a reasonable amount of time" ?

Choosing a fast-breeding animal can be great if you can feed them, but be wary of bonded animal death debuffs. On the other end of the spectrum, having only large powerful animals is great - but they are usually slow breeders.

I think wild boars tend to hit a lot of the right points: decent damage, quite fast, very fast breeders with multiple offspring litters. Can be trained to haul. Can graze and feed themselves given the space for it. Just don't expect them to survive most of the time.

Good tank animals are rhinos, bears (they have an amazing stun ability), and elephants. These very frequently survive battles even if they get incapacitated - and can get patched up for re-use. It just takes a long long time to get them up to speed. Hard to tame, hard to train, slow breeders. At least rhinos and elephants can graze (though they do eat a whole lot).

It's worth mentioning also that there is a "exploity" way to get animals to attack without the release mechanic - including animals that really aren't very battle-oriented, like chickens. You can just use the zoning tools to make them run into the enemy and they will defend themselves when attacked. Pretty cheezy though... even if it is hilarious.

TLDR: It's not easy to primarily use animals for combat, nor optimal in most cases, but it is doable with the right setup.

-Stigma

Hey all,

I've had this problem rattling around my brain for a bit...
Assume a wide open flat area of normal soil. You want to plant a lot of stuff - but you also want your pawns to be able to move around quickly. Not only to plant/harvest all those crops but to get around in general.

Now what sort of pattern of roads (meaning any 100% speed floor) and growing plots would be optimal? It's a fairly complex problem - and though you could probably solve this via math for a "correct" solution I'm not setting the bar quite that high

Main things to consider I think is:
- The pattern used. A grid of rectangles is the most obvious, but my intuition tells me it is far from ideal. For one it is pretty bad any time your pawns need to travel diagonally.
- The density of roads compared to farming plots. More roads means faster travel, but also less dense farming area - meaning you need to travel more (not to mention needing more space in total for the same yield). There must be a good balance somewhere.

If anyone has good ideas I'm all ears. Also, it does rather seem like the sort of problem that someone good with math has already obsessed over - so if there is a thread or other resource on this you know about - please link it

-Stigma

How do you guys feel this mod compares to the "Quarry" mod?
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=942690136

IMO quarry looks very balanced to not be too convenient or too OP - but still technically gives you an infinite source of any minable material that exists in the game. Feels pretty natural and not so much like an "infinite generator of whatever material you want" sort of thing. It kind of simulates a less efficient version of what you do in the normal game when you do exploratory mining and just take whatever deposits you find - so getting rare materials is still rare and you can't really do much about that except throw more work at it.

I feel it really leaves room for other mining options like more targeted deep mining, and also meshes well with the ore scanner from the miningco mod. I really like that for mining expeditions outside my home tile when the need for very specific materials is pressing.

If anyone has good feedback after having used both in long games I'd love to hear your opinions.

-Stigma

Is it normal that when guests are killed by wild animals, the faction relation drops by -5 ?

Because I use the mod that makes the map fills with many predators and guests are attacked to death quite often.

Yea it's normal for faction rating to drop slightly if visitors die in your territory.
I guess you can think of it this way - if your allies keep having casualties every time they visit you they probably eventually decide that it's not worth visiting you - regardless of if it's "your fault" or not.

It is also a moderating way to prevent cheezing the system by "accidentally" having caravans die all the time by "an unfortunate fire accident" or other such indirect means. it's not as bad as outright attacking, but I guess they will become apprehensive ...

I don't know at exactly which point they just stop visiting. Hopefully that happens before they actually go hostile.

-Stigma

Great to finally see some new interesting traps that aren't just reskins of existing ones with different stats.

Ditto on a non-steam download though.

-Stigma

Consider making "drop on floor" default, or letting there be some option somewhere.
As a veteran player who likes to optimize I almost never use anything else. Hauling is for haulers - crafting is for crafters.

-Stigma

Ok I have some practical feedback after using this in my latest run.
Something fairly critical that is missing...

We really need some sort of counter of "remaining XXXTECHLEVEL projects" counter, or even better - a list or just SOMETHING to help you find remaining projects that you need to finish for a level.

Because the main problem I have is that I have to spend AGES pouring over all the research and try to find that one last research project that is required for me to advance. There is no way to see this easily. Research pal does tell you in the popup-text, but you still have to read every research option to find out - and its just a nightmare... not this mods fault pr se. but it makes it super impractical, doubly so with mods installed that add their own projects that you can't easily just wiki or whatever.

-Stigma

I think Tynan made the tech level 'system' the way it is so that, when making their desired scenario, someone can choose to play the role of a slow-researching faction, or a faster one.  Basically, difficulty modes, no?

As in, it's not at all the same situation as in games like Civ.  The tech levels are fluff, is what Im suggesting, and that he intended for them to act as difficulty levels.

Trust me when I say that tech advancement in no way makes tribals "fast", or "as fast", or even "not horribly slow" at research =P

Tribals with the vanilla system start slow and then get AGONIZINGLY slow at later levels as everythign started to require 3x and 4x research. You need 3-4 researchers to get anywhere. It's not fun IMO, and the reason why a lot of people got turned of tribals because you just never seem to get anywhere and eventually get totally bottlenecked by it.

As soon as tech levels made it into the game I felt that this was missing immediately in order for the curve to be somewhat smooth.
To each his own though.

-Stigma